Firefighter Busted For Making Extracts In The Fire Station

The plan was to
fight fire with fire extract, but now it appears that the fire-fire plan has
backfired. Travis Allen, a Lieutenant with the Hillsborough County Fire Rescue
in Florida, was arrested Monday after deputies discovered his efforts to make
sweet cannabis extract inside the local firehouse.

Some reports,
however, are pretty misleading about Allen’s conduct. We first got this story
from the Miami Herald, one of the biggest newspapers in
Florida, who in turn got it from the Tampa Bay Times, another of the state’s
leading news outlets.

According to both
the Herald and the Times, Allen was arrested after someone discovered a
“botanical extractor device” and “two marijuana plants.”

That sounds a
whole lot like the guy had a mini cannabis oil lab going and was either growing
weed or bringing whole plants to the firehouse make batches of concentrate in
the basement or somewhere tucked away. But that’s not what Allen was up to.

After less than
five minutes of research, we were able to find a much more thorough account of
the incident at Firehouse.com, a leading resource for U.S.
firefighting news and information.

According to
Firehouse, what was discovered inside the Hillsborough station was not some
rigged up extraction operation, but the Magical Butter Botanical Extractor, a small
cooking device that looks like a thermos and sells for $175 on Amazon.

The “two
marijuana plants” apparently consisted of “two pieces of marijuana,” according
to Firehouse. They were at the bottom of the device in a “yellow liquid,”
probably butter given the extractor’s name.

Allen apparently
left the botanical extractor plugged in the station’s workout room. When
someone found it, they called the police.

Allen admitted
both the device and the cannabis were his. Though he has an active medical
marijuana card in Florida, a police report stated that he was not authorized to
manufacture cannabis products, nor was he permitted to process plant material.

So, a medical
marijuana patient was arrested and publicly humiliated for making cannabis
butter, which officials are terming processing plant material. He probably
should have known better to do it at work, but, you know, shit happens.

Allen was
released from jail Thursday on a $2,000 bail. He has been with the Hillsborough
County Fire Rescue but is now suspended from duty pending an investigation.Photo
via Flickr user Thomas’s Pics